On Tue, 24 Jun 2003 15:45:04 -0700, Pierce Nichols <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> If you set the altitude requirement correctly (say, 100 km), then >it pretty much has to be some kind of space transport, and someone who >wants to try it with something like a skip glider (or other things I >haven't thought of) has a chance. The FAST program is designed, as a program, to push manned orbital flight. Something that meets one of the intermediate goals, but can't be further developed toward a manned orbital transport, wouldn't meet the program goal. So I'd need some serious persuasion to want to change an intermediate goal to something more accommodating to a non-rocket technology. Is this a failure of imagination on my part? Maybe. Imagination isn't my greatest strength. But I think the intermediate goals we chose make sense in view of the program goal. >You could also achieve a similar effect >by stretching the time limit out to something a bit more generous but still >well beyond the range of any conventional a/c -- say 90 minutes or so. Sure, but that's only Mach 2. Even an 60 minutes only forces you to Mach 3. It would be really great to promote the development of a true SST. But an SST won't get anyone into orbit unless it could be used as the first stage of an nSTO. That's not a bad thing, but it's not obviously what we want to promote. >There's not a whole lot of practical difference between 30 and 90 minutes >for this sort of application, at least in the near term. Your door to door >time (i.e., what the customer is paying for) is still dominated by the time >required to get the payload to and from the launch sites on either end. Absolutely true. My hour-hour-hour model still looks realistic, unfortunately. And if low door to door time for express package delivery was the end goal of the program, I'd agree with you completely. -R -- "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." -- Robert Wilensky, UC Berkeley _______________________________________________ ERPS-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.erps.org/mailman/listinfo/erps-list
